It was twelve miles through the defiles of the Bad Lands to the blue ridge of the high mesa where the hostiles had lived. The trail was strewn with dead cattle, some of them having never been touched with a knife. Here and there a dead pony, ridden to a stand-still and left nerveless on the trail. No words of mine can describe these Bad Lands. They are somewhat as Dore pictured hell. One set of buttes, with cones and minarets, gives place in the next mile to natural freaks of a different variety, never dreamed of by mortal man. It is the action of water on clay; there are ashes or what looks like them. The painter’s whole palette is in one bluff.[53]
THE SETTLERS COME
White settlement of the Badlands region was slow. Suited for grazing, the region in the 1890’s was primarily the domain of cattlemen and sheepmen. At that time the region was surveyed by the Government.[54]
Figure 8 OLD INTERIOR, 1906
Settled in about 1881, the town was known as Black until the name was changed around 1895. It was located about two miles southeast of the present town of Interior. In 1907, old Interior was abandoned in favor of the present townsite when the Milwaukee Road was built.[55]
Bruce Siberts, a Dakota cowboy, was in the Badlands several times during the early 1890’s. He stated:
The big pasture west of the Missouri that the Sioux had turned over to Uncle Sam had few ranchers in it when I went there in 1890, but within another year or so there were all kinds of livestock roaming over it.[56]
Siberts’ acquaintance with the Badlands was the result of his experience with cattle thieves who “holed up” there. The outlaws, after stealing Siberts’ cattle, drove them to the Badlands.
Siberts started out in pursuit. During a week’s stay in the Badlands, he saw thousands of head of stock, many of which were unbranded. Unable to recover his stolen cattle, he returned to his home on Plum Creek, a tributary of the Cheyenne River. He obtained a companion and went back to the Badlands. There the two men built several horse traps, captured a number of unbranded horses, branded them, and later sold the horses for $600.[57] Siberts returned alone to the region the following year to obtain more unbranded horses, but lost his horses to outlaws. As a result he was left afoot many miles from home. Siberts succeeded in taking the horse of Bill Newsom, head of a group of cattle rustlers, and made his way to a railroad town in Nebraska. He returned to South Dakota by rail.[58]